In Search of Sleep by Bregje Hofstede

Author:Bregje Hofstede
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Greystone Books
Published: 2023-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

21:00 Time

WHEN COVID-19 CRIPPLED public life, our world was turned upside down. While lots of people suffered from stress and sleepless nights as a result, others thrived.1 The daily commute was eliminated; you just had to look presentable in front of the Zoom camera. You no longer accidentally found yourself window-shopping on the way home from work. Those who weren’t suddenly burdened with the responsibilities of home schooling found themselves with a lot of time on their hands. “All of a sudden, I’ve got so much time,” I kept hearing people say. And, for those with a secure income, there was also suddenly so much calm. “It’s only now that I realize how busy I always was”—I must have heard about twenty different versions of this same sentence. It was usually followed by something along the lines of, “It’s a breath of fresh air, to be honest.” When the second wave broke out, and the world closed down again, a friend of mine even sighed, “I’m glad, really, because I’d been starting to get overworked again.”

I burst out laughing. But it is actually perverse that it takes an emergency situation to keep us from flying through our days at breakneck speed.

What would you do if every day unexpectedly had more hours in it? Would you finally start reading more, walking more, cooking more; would you spend that time looking for a better job or finally start thinking about the house move you didn’t have the energy for before? How would your evening look, and would that make a difference to your night?

For quite a few people, their lack of sleep is a direct consequence of a lack of time. In a survey carried out in Amsterdam, three in ten men and as many as half of women reported that they didn’t have enough time to sleep. It is therefore not especially surprising that 80 percent of those surveyed were unsatisfied with their sleep. The sleep doctor Kristel Kasius, who commented on the study, stated that a lack of time was one of the main causes of sleep problems among her patients. “I see lots of young people in Amsterdam who don’t have the time to relax and sleep. There are not enough hours in the day for everything: family, career, sports, parties, and so on. Sleep has to be squeezed into the limited time that is left over.”2

Not having the time to hit the hay is one thing, but a lack of time can also indirectly eat away at your night. Even if you spend enough hours in bed, you may not be able to get to sleep because you have spent the whole day in a race against the clock.

Hectic working days often go hand in hand with disturbed sleep.3 If your work pressure is too high—or you have too many tasks and not enough time to complete them—research shows that you often sleep less and worse: you have trouble falling asleep and staying asleep, and the sleep that you do get is less restful.

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